Documentary Makers Begin a Film, and Then It Is Taken Over by Life

By NANCY RAMSEY

Published: December 29, 2004

When the filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond began working on ''The Congregation,'' to be broadcast on PBS tonight, their plan was to follow a year in the life of an urban Protestant church in Philadelphia. It would not be a church that made headlines; their film would not be about the Christian right and its influence on politics.

WETA, the Washington PBS station, had offered the Raymonds the topic, and it did not want a congregation ''on some new fringe, not a born-again church in a movie theater, not a snake-charming one,'' said Dalton Delan, WETA's chief programming officer. ''Mainstream'' was the mandate.

After months of visiting churches the Raymonds, a husband-and-wife team, chose the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, established in 1796 and affectionately known today to its members by the clunky acronym Fumcog. A new pastor, the Rev. Fred Day, had recently been appointed, providing a solid structuring element for the film. ''We'd experience it through the new minister's eyes,'' Ms. Raymond said.

''What we didn't know,'' she added, ''was anything about Beth.''

Beth was the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud, the church's associate pastor, whom the Raymonds initially saw as just ''a supporting character.'' Then in April 2003 she declared herself an ''openly lesbian, fully credentialed, United Methodist pastor'' in a Sunday morning sermon.

''I know that by telling the truth about myself,'' she told the congregation, ''I risk losing my credentials as an ordained United Methodist minister.''

The congregation -- which has a long tradition of liberal social activism -- gave Ms. Stroud a standing ovation. But on Dec. 2, a jury of 13 Methodist ministers voted 12 to 1 that as a ''self-avowed, practicing'' homosexual she had violated church law, and 7 to 6 to revoke her ordination. On Monday Ms. Stroud announced that she would appeal; a regional church panel will take up the matter.

''I believe that church law is going to change in my lifetime, and I'll have my credentials back,'' she said in a telephone interview, but added, ''I don't know when that'll be.'' In the two-hour film, for which the Raymonds videotaped 120 hours over 24 months, viewers are taken into the lovely old stone church for sermons; into meetings about finances and routine administrative matters; into Ms. Stroud's home with her partner, Chris Paige, and her parents as she talks about her decision to come out. (Ms. Stroud said last week that the filmmakers' presence did not influence the decision, that ''it was well under way long before we had the idea that somebody would be filming.'')

Viewers are taken into the home of the Days, where Linda Day talks about the difficulties of moving her family, and of worrying about whether her husband will be accepted by a congregation divided over his sermons and style. One member refers to the congregation as ''an eclectic bunch of do-gooders'' -- lots of social workers and teachers -- and Ms. Raymond's spare narration informs us that Mr. Day is succeeding a charismatic, politically active minister, Dr. Theodore Loder, who led the church for 37 years. While the two may share politics, Mr. Day's style is more low-key, more traditional.

With Ms. Stroud, ''in some strange twist of fate, we've hit a nerve,'' said Susan Raymond over dinner recently in Midtown Manhattan, shortly after she and her husband had completed editing the final scenes of ''The Congregation'' to include Ms. Stroud's ecclesiastical trial. ''The whole issue of gay rights, or human rights, and gays in the ministry is up there with same-sex marriage.''

Hitting a nerve is nothing new for the Raymonds. They made headlines in the early 1970's with ''An American Family,'' a 12-part PBS series on the Louds, a family in Santa Barbara, Calif., that seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Pat asked Bill for a divorce on camera; their son, Lance, announced to all of America that he was gay at a time when it was not so accepted. It was a reality show before the term ''reality show'' became part of the popular parlance, well before Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne opened their doors to MTV cameras. (Ask the Raymonds about today's reality shows, and Ms. Raymond sums up her view succinctly: ''Let's put this person and that person together and see if they have a fight.'')

After ''An American Family,'' the Raymonds, who lived in New York for many years but now live outside Philadelphia, went on to make films in the back of police cars in the South Bronx (''The Police Tapes''), in prisons (''Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House'') and in war zones (''Children in War'').

While they were working on ''The Congregation,'' Lance Loud called them to come to California to make a film about him. He was dying of AIDS, and he wanted his final months documented.

''The idea that you were handed this responsibility, to make a legacy film,'' Mr. Raymond said, ''it was, to use an old hippie expression, a heavy experience.'' The film, ''Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family,'' was broadcast in early 2003.

It was the Raymonds' body of work that helped persuade the Germantown congregation to allow their cameras in, particularly the Academy Award-winning ''I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School,'' which followed a year in the life of an inner-city elementary school in Philadelphia in the early 1990's.

''I thought, Wow, this could really be a powerful way to tell the story of who we are as a congregation,'' Ms. Stroud said, by phone from Philadelphia; the Germantown church has kept her on as a lay minister. ''Just that nitty-gritty daily struggle of running a public school and trying to educate children. I thought it would be really great to have the same view of a church. There's a lot that goes into the life of a church that's very hard, very challenging, very moving, that to society is fairly invisible.''

''Since my story has been so much in the news,'' she added, ''I'm glad for it to be told in the context of the community in which it happened.''

Add Ms. Stroud's surprise journey to that of Fred Day's, and the film that began as ''a year in the life of a typical mainstream, and therefore Protestant, church,'' as Mr. Delan, the WETA programmer, characterized it, became, he said, ''less about the congregation and more about pastoral leadership issues.''

''It's about how we as Americans handle who we choose as our leaders,'' he said. ''It's a quiet film with a real explosive core.''

Besides, Mr. Raymond said, ''Who wants to make a documentary when you know what happens?''

''That's the fun of it all,'' Ms. Raymond added.

Photos: The Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud, above, surrounded by children from her congregation, figured larger in a documentary by Susan and Alan Raymond, on location at right for another film, than they expected. (Photos by Video Verité, above left; Courtesy Alan Raymond)